Denial Of Service Attacks (DoS)

In DoS attacks, the attacker attempts to overload or shut down a system so that users can no longer access it. Most frequently web servers are targetted in order to make websites unavailable. The main target is not to steal or compromise data but to interrupt a web service which can prove costly for some organisations and companies.

These types of attacks involve sending more traffic to a system than it can handle. This can be performed by sending oversized data packets, sending email attachments which longer names than supported by mail programs, sending IP ping messages that seem to originate from the victim computer to a large number of computers (victim is flooded with responses afterwards).

A Distructed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) attack uses a large number of computers (usually part of a zombie network - computers that are compromised and controlled by hackers by using a virus or trojan) to launch the attack.

Phising